the part of the poisonwood bible that always hits me in the gut (i.e. makes me cry and wonder about the strangeness of life and happiness and guilt):

the belly of the plane groaned open and we were delivered abruptly into the benign spring air of fort benning, georgia.

it is impossible to describe the shock of return. i recall that i stood for the longest time staring at a neatly painted yellow line on a neatly formed cement curb. yellow yellow line line. i pondered the human industry, the paint, the cement truck and the concrete forms, all the resources that had gone into that one curb. for what? i could not quite think of the answer. so that no car would park there? are there so many cars that america must be divided into places with and places without them? was it always so, or did they multiply vastly, along with telephones and new shoes and transistor radios and cellophane-wrapped tomatoes, in our absense?